Things I Thought I Had Written About But I Guess I Didn’t??: Horse Meat

July 12, 2010

GMail Chat Window With A Friend

Me: You gonna eat raw horse
Him: do they?
Me: Yep
I had it once
A local restaurant serves it
It’s not bad save for the mental image that you are eating a horse
Him: oh you bastard!
really!?
horse?!?
trip canceled, you monster
Me: Ahahahahahahaha
Him: way to hid this from japantrick
Me: Everyone else was doing it
I thought I wrote this? I might have just told my parents
Him: i don’t think you did
Me: Well, now you know my dark secret

Man, maybe turning 23 really does mean I’m getting old because I swore I wrote about this before. But turns out I didn’t…an absolute shocker considering how many entries I’ve devoted to “weird” potato chip flavors that actually just taste like BBQ. So this is wellllllll past its expiration date but hey gotta post something.

As indicated by sushi, the Japanese aren’t intimidated by eating raw meat. But it goes way beyond tuna rolls. You can eat all sorts of weird stuff raw…I’ve heard of places serving raw whale and of course there is always the fabled establishments offering dolphin. The most terrifying, at least to me, would be raw chicken meat…that just seems especially dangerous, though maybe no worse than salmon eggs. I won’t eat it though.

Then there is horse. Whereas the above items most be seeked out, you can apparently get raw horse at a major chain restaurant, which is where I experienced my first (and last) brush with the food. I forget the specific details…I know it was late at night…but a few of us ended up at this joint and somehow thought “hey what if we tried raw horse meat?” as if that was just a natural thing to do. Somehow nobody objected to this and we ordered some.

Everything about the experience is mental…the actual dish looks like any raw red meat (though, I don’t know why this illusion makes eating uncooked meat any better) but once the thought you will be consuming Mr. Ed enters you’re head, it’s hard to shake. My family owned horses when I was little and we were attempting to fit into the caught-in-the-gold-rush town of we just moved to, so suddenly being confronted with the opportunity to eat them threw me for a loop. I wasn’t alone. Getting over the mental hurdle was the ultimate challenge.

Once I did though…spurred by being really hungry…eating the horse was pretty easy. As for the taste…it was kinda tasty for raw meat, but also raw meat so not a particularly high bar. I would never order it again.

Well, hope waiting seven months for this story was worth it.

(Japanese Fun Fact #74: At 3-D movies in Japan, you don’t get those flimsy glasses you usually throw into a recycle box after the film. You get these bulky goggle-things more apt for a coal miner or a pod racer.)